Inés listened to Frasco's story with the same fascinated attention she had felt when she was a little girl in the dark listening to tales of islands and tall empty ships that sail up the valley of the Guadalquivir on moonless nights. She was standing behind Minaya, and from time to time she touched his shoulder or brushed his neck with a very light touch, because nothing pleased her as much as enveloping any sign of tenderness in secrecy. With a shiver of gratitude he squeezed the hand she held out to him in the shadows as they followed Frasco up the stairs to the room Solana had occupied during the last three months of his life, a large hay loft with a sloping roof and long beams with halters tied to them, and in the back a single window covered with a piece of burlap that tinted the light the yellow of pollen. Under the bed was the trunk no one had opened for the past twenty-two years, because Frasco hadn't wanted to touch anything after the Civil Guard left carrying the dripping wet body of Jacinto Solana.
"I swept up the ashes. The floor was full of burned papers everywhere, even under the bed, I don't know how the roof didn't catch fire — you can see it's made of wood and reeds — and burn the whole house down. They didn't burn all the papers at the same time, in a bonfire; it seems they burned them one by one."
"Did they burn the books too?" asked Minaya as he examined the blue ink stains on the table. Stains of a finger sometimes, like fingerprints, long stains like the shadow of Jacinto Solana's hands.
"There weren't any books. Don Jacinto didn't bring any when he came here. Nothing but the suitcase tied with rope and the pistol in his jacket pocket. He wrote with a pen Don Manuel had given him. The Guards must have taken it with them because I didn't see it again."
Moving aside the piece of burlap that covered the window, Inés leaned her elbows on the sill to look at the river and the walled blue line of the city, as if she weren't listening to Frasco's words. The water formed dark clotted eddies around the pillars of the bridge and the reedbeds on the shore. Beneath the window was the sloping roof of the small shed from which Jacinto Solana had jumped to the embankment, rolling blind through the slippery leaves of oleander, between the darkness and the mud, then getting up and pushing his elbows into the red earth to fire at the Guards pursuing him. Inés, said Minaya, and from the tone of his voice she knew they were alone now in the loft and all she had to do was remain motionless and he would embrace her from the rear and caress her breasts, saying her name again in a darker voice as if it were hidden in her hair, which he explored with his lips. But this time Minaya didn't embrace her: Frasco had gone, he said, and would be right back, and while they were alone he wanted to open the trunk under the bed. When he raised the lid Minaya had the sensation that he was opening a coffin. "There's nothing," said Inés, kneeling beside him, "just old clothes." They searched down to the bottom of the trunk, where there was a pair of cracked shoes, a fountain pen, a cigarette lighter, a red ribbon like the ones tied around the manuscripts in the marriage bedroom. Like the metal bed with the bare mattress, and the ink stains on the table, each of the things they exhumed added obscurely to the others to lay out before them the empty mass of Jacinto Solana's presence. "Memory doesn't last," Minaya thought as he opened the pen that perhaps Solana touched a few minutes before he died, as he attempted to work the lighter that for so many nights had occupied a precise place between the habits of writing and insomnia, "the only things that last have always belonged to forgetting, the pen, the lighter, a pair of shoes, an ink stain like a fingerprint on the wood." It was Inés who found the notebook and the small cartridge wrapped in a piece of newspaper. She was folding a gray jacket to put it back in the trunk when she noticed a hard, smooth surface in the lining, and then, as she continued searching, a bundle so small that at first her fingers didn't distinguish it from the fold where it was resting. There was a tear in the inside pocket, and the cartridge and notebook had undoubtedly slipped through it. "Look, it's the same handwriting as on the manuscript." It was a notebook whose pages were graph paper, it had a blue cover and a schoolboy air, and it was irregularly filled by writing that seemed disciplined by desperation. That afternoon as they returned to the city on the train, Minaya examined the pages where the lines of ink were now as faint as the grid marks, and when he deciphered the words, which at times he read aloud to Inés, the images of the river, the esplanade in front of the house, the room with the table and the single window through which you could see the silhouette of Magina, specified the details of a nocturnal setting surrounding the figure who in the light of a candle writes incessantly even after he hears the uproar of rifle butts banging on the door of the country house, when the Guards' boots thundered like galloping horses on the stairs, but he knows he's going to die and doesn't want his final words to end up in the fire. "He hid the notebook in the jacket lining himself," Minaya told Inés excitedly, as if he were talking to himself, to his yearning to find out and know, "because this diary was his will, and he knew that when he began to write it." He kept the notebook when they reached Magina station, not having read yet the long account that filled the last pages and consequently not understanding the reason why there was also a cartridge in the lining wrapped in a piece of the Republican ABC of May 22, 1937. Only that night, last night, when Manuel was already dead on the rug in the marriage bedroom, did Minaya lock the door of his room and discover that Solana had recounted the death of Mariana in the last pages of the notebook, and that the bullet that killed her hadn't come from the roofs where militia men were pursuing a fugitive, but from a pistol that someone held and fired from the doorway of the pigeon loft.
12
HE HAD TELEPHONED Medina himself and gone downstairs to unbolt the outside door so the doctor would find it open when he arrived, bringing to these actions a useless urgency, a somnambulistic haste similar to that shown by Teresa and Inés in preparing coffee, bottles of hot water, clean sheets for making the bed where Minaya and Utrera had lain Manuel, as if death were not something definitive, as if it could be stopped or mitigated by pretending they were ministering not to a corpse but a sick person, and their hurry to arrange everything in the marriage bedroom in silence, not speaking to each other or to anyone else, avoiding looking at each other just as they tried not to look at the man lying on the bed, was motivated by the sense of propriety that the imminent arrival of the doctor provokes in houses where someone is ill. Wandering in a waking state as dark as the film over her eyes, Amalia drifted between the gallery hallway and the parlor and marriage bedroom, setting herself vague tasks she didn't complete, bringing a glass of water to Doña Elvira or clumsily smoothing the quilt around Manuel's feet, and she murmured things that to Minaya's ear were confused with Doña Elvira's murmurs or prayers and the profusion of footsteps that exaggerated the silence. Like fish in an aquarium they all passed one another in the area of the bedroom and the parlor, their bodies sometimes making contact but not their eyes, and if Minaya, overcoming for a moment the stupefaction of a guilt that resembled our guilt for the crimes we commit in dreams, searched out Inés' eyes when he found himself alone with her in the hallway, he encountered an attitude of flight or a fixed stare that did not seem to notice him. He wasn't afraid then that they would be discovered: with a fear that wiped out all culpability or sense of danger, he was afraid only that Inés had stopped loving him.